DSNI New Directions
BOSTON PROMISE INITIATIVE (BPI)
Inspired by the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), the U.S. Department of Education (ED) developed the Promise Neighborhoods initiative in 2010 to improve the educational opportunities of children in distressed communities. The program, a major initiative of the Obama administration, offers grant funding to develop educational and community support programs to assist children from birth through college and career within a focused geographical area. The Boston Promise Initiative (BPI) began implementation in 2013, and is funded through an ED grant for $6 million over five years.
Boston boasts a tremendous array of services for families, many of which are evidence-based and already serving as national models. But due to fragmentation among providers and constraints on service delivery models imposed by funding, contracts and public policy, the many high-quality programs of Boston are not at scale and equally distributed to its residents.
When leaders at DSNI first heard about the Promise Neighborhoods strategy, they saw it as a natural continuation of their organizing and planning work, and became involved to leverage their expertise as a connector among residents, systems, and institutions in the neighborhood. DSNI wrote the proposal that won a Promise Neighborhoods grant for Boston, and became the lead agency for the initiative. “Because we believe the mark of a healthy community is healthy children and youth, we’re building an environment where families and community are supporting the learning of young people in the neighborhood,” says Sheena Collier, director of BPI for DSNI.
The BPI strategy is phased, starting with the creation of the Dudley Village Campus (DVC), covering the whole Dudley neighborhood. The plan is for it to later expand to a larger area of Boston known as the Circle of Promise (CoP, http://www.cityofboston.gov/Circle/), with the final goal of encompassing the entire city. The CoP effort is a school- and place-based strategy that focuses on high student achievement and supports for students and families in an area of Boston with a high number of underperforming schools.
As of 2016, community- and school-based partnerships have been awarded over a $1.3 million dollars in grant funding through the BPI, which creates a continuum of support from birth to age 24 and includes early childhood programs, partnerships with neighborhood schools, and strategies such as hosting workshops for families on the college application and financial aid process to help residents achieve college and career success.
One major accomplishment of BPI has been the opening of a new Boston Public Schools in-district charter elementary school—the Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School—in September 2012. That project was led by BPE (formerly known as Boston Plan for Excellence). BPI is also playing a major role in school improvement efforts at Orchard K-8 School, now Dearborn STEM Academy and Burke High School (all were designated “turnaround schools” by BPS), as well as school readiness efforts through Dudley Children Thrive, focused on engaging and supporting families with children ages 0-5.
While academic success is the primary goal of the BPI, an increasing body of evidence suggests that placing youth in nurturing educational environments leads to downstream health and social benefits as well. On the flip side, social and family supports are just as important as academic ones for supporting academic success. For example, an important element of the initiative is No Child Goes Homeless, a partnership with the social services agency Project Hope to provide resources, organizing support, and foreclosure and eviction prevention to ensure that no child in the Dudley Village Campus goes homeless.